Is it possible to use Python to write cross-platform apps for both iOS and Android?

Question

Is it possible to use Python to write cross-platform apps for both iOS and Android

Answer 1

An option is kivy: a cool cross platform Python framework which works for Android, Win7, Linux, MacOSX and iOS.

Update: kivy project is growing daily, now supports also Raspberry Pi

Answer 2

For Android Google provides something called ASE (Android Scripting Environment) which allows scripting languages (Python included) to run on Android. More details here

For iOS, it might be quite a bit more complicated (and I'd advise to check the latest version of iOS SDK agreement to check the current state of the law - apple tends to allow & disallow such apps periodically). For the technical part you might need to interface between Python & Objective C as well as do some wizardry to statically link all the libraries Python requires; full details are available here. Another approach for iOS Python development would be to embed a Python interpreter into you app and distribute your Python script with it (so to play nicely with Apple rules). In this case your Python application would be a Python interpreter which is packaged with your script and runs it automatically.

Second option is to use Kivy framework(kivy.org) - it's a framework to write touch-friendly applications in Python and package them for different platforms. It's had Android support for a while, and recently added iOS support